Albert's Story

By Albert E. Sevcik

Science-fiction author Albert “Al” Sevcik grew up during the 1930’s on a rural Hawaiian sugar plantation. At eleven years of age he experienced the frightening arrival of the Second World War close to home. His parents, anxious about his education because of closed schools, sent him 2,000 miles by sea to California and 1,500 miles further across the western US to relatives in Oklahoma. Later, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was an officer in the Air Force during the Korean War and attended the Harvard Business School. After time with a leading advertising agency and a plastics company, he spent a quarter of a century in a high-pressure position with a major oil company. He has authored many science-fiction stories, published in magazines and anthologies. Albert’s goal in bringing you this well-written, readable story of his life is for you to enjoy his experiences as much as he enjoyed writing about them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716783418

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ALBERT’S

STORY

ALBERT E. SEVCIK

Copyright © 2020 Albert E. Sevcik.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-7166-2701-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7167-8341-8 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 08/28/2020

PART I

1930 -1941

The sun cleared one horizon; the full moon slid below the other; September 7, 1930 began. On the island of Kauai in the county seat of Lihue, one of the Lihue Hospital’s two nurses checked the large clock on the wall: 8:30 in the morning Hawaiian Standard Time. At that moment Doctor Kuhns completed the cesarean operation and lifted me into the world. Doctor and nurse smiled at my angry protest.

The usual things were done, the umbilical cord was cut, I was wiped clean and handed to my mother, groggy from spinal block anesthesia. Martha, Dr. Kuhns said, You’ve got a healthy boy. Mom smiled in relief. Eighteen months earlier another boy had died during childbirth.

***

My earliest specific memory: I am 2 years old, running along the deck of the British passenger ship Monowai; running to tell Mom of my discovery. My friend, Mary Lou, is also on the ship. This must have been the day after we boarded. We had waited in small boats, bobbing in the open ocean for hours, waiting for the passenger ship to arrive from Honolulu, a hundred miles away. Faint from seasickness, Mom had been carried aboard. We were traveling to Oklahoma and Nebraska to visit Mom’s sister and brothers in Oklahoma and Dad’s parents in Nebraska. Mom came to Kauai in 1926 when it was still the Territory of Hawaii, to teach for six months or so after graduating from the University of Oklahoma. The six months had long passed. She had not been home for six years.

My second earliest memory is from that same 1932 trip. I am walking down the rocking aisle of a railroad Pullman car. It is night and the upper and lower bunks have been made up with curtains drawn so I am following a faintly illuminated path between two rows of dark curtains. The train makes a sudden lurch and I am thrown against one of the made-up bunks.

Once off the ship in Los Angeles, Mom recovered quickly and within a day was eager for the train trip to Oklahoma where we would spend several summer weeks visiting her sister Bertha and brothers Rothwell and Julian. Then we traveled to Nebraska to visit Dad’s parents, Albert and Lillian, on their farm. I have photos testifying to these events, but no memory of them.

***

When I was born Dad was working as chief chemist for a pineapple canning company. He left the job early in 1932, dissatisfied with the working conditions. About that time the depression hit Hawaiian businesses and jobs disappeared. Mother’s teaching provided a thin, but livable, income. In early 1934 Dad accepted a position on a Sugar Plantation, and we moved into a wood frame house, third from the far end of a row of a dozen homes for plantation professional staff. The row of homes ended at the plantation office, sugar mill, and warehouse.

The sugar mill operated six days week washing and smashing stalks of cane and boiling the juice down to brown crystals of raw sugar. A steady input of narrow-gage rail cars heaped with freshly cut cane stalks fed the mill. The mill’s steam whistle announced the start of each work shift or alerted everyone to emergencies such as an uncontrolled fire in one of the fields.

The rumbling of the mill was a faint but constant background presence, always there but unnoticed until midnight on Friday when the grinding, hissing, clanking mechanism suddenly went silent. Before dawn on Monday, it would all start again.

Our house had three modest-sized bedrooms, one bath, kitchen, living room, separate dining room, and a small office. For Dad, the plantation added an additional bedroom and bath for maid’s quarters. This was my home from my fourth year until I was eleven. Over the years I attempted from time to time to build a tree house in the giant mango by the kitchen door. All I ever managed to complete was a wood platform.

A gravel road ran by the front yard, which was guarded by two royal palm trees. Across the road an extensive sugar cane field began. The back yard held a raised glass-covered support in which a water pipe looped back and forth for maximum exposure to the sun. The water came from the same mountain streams that also irrigated the sugar cane. (In the 1930s the streams ran pure and clear. Two decades before they became infected by runoff from livestock.) The water that was diverted through the glass-covered pipes was heated by the sun and provided our hot water. In the kitchen Mom covered the sink faucet with a cloth bag to catch the occasional small fish and other critters. There was also a concrete-floored laundry building with two concrete wash tubs and an outdoor wood fireplace that supported a large tin tub for heating wash water. Laundry dried quickly in the tropical sun, but one had to keep alert for a passing shower.

Dad built a dozen rabbit hutches and a chicken coop in the back yard. The animals were for food. I was required to assist him in killing rabbits (a quick blow to the back of the head with a heavy club) and chickens (a chop with the hatchet). This was never enjoyable. I never had romantic notions about the source of our food. The experience also offered opportunities to contemplate mortality, though my pre-teen-self did not pursue such thoughts far. It might have been a good time for my father to open a discussion on the subject, but he did not, and I never learned what his feelings were regarding an afterlife. I was not allowed to name any of the rabbits or chickens.

Just beyond the back-yard hedge there was a narrow dirt and grass road; beyond that were sugar cane fields as far as one could see. When the fields either in front or behind the house were plowed for planting the air was thick with red dust that covered kids, clothing, and furniture. It was worse when the cane was harvested. Harvesting meant setting a multi-acre-controlled fire to burn away the leaves, dead and green, leaving only orange cane stalks for the harvesting crews to cut and send to the mill by truck or rail. Instead of red dust the air was filled with ash and soot. It was difficult to dust-proof the house. Homes were not air conditioned then and closing the windows quickly made the house stuffy.

Each house on the row had a yard that was separated from its neighbor by a hedge of panex, a broad-leafed shrub, through which Fred, Chris, Sonny, Mary, and I ran freely.

***

On school days the plantation provided a wood-paneled station wagon to take us to a three-room school (grades one through seven) at another sugar plantation about twenty miles away.

The schooling worked because when I was seven, in the second grade, I became a newspaper publisher. Mother loaned me her hectograph, a gelatin filled cookie sheet, and one of her special pencils which wrote in purple. I used the pencil to write a one-page newspaper and duplicated ten copies that I distributed to the houses in my neighborhood. The paper was actively published for four months on an irregular schedule. I basked in positive comments from the parents of my friends.

***

The sugar plantation owned a rambling four-bedroom house in a forested national park in the mountains, a two-hour drive from home, of which the second half was winding and steep. In the house was a wind-up Victrola which played 78 rpm records using shiny steel needles in a holder which fed sound vibrations to a speaker in the cabinet’s base. No electricity required. In fact, there was no electricity available. Everyone cooked and lighted their homes with bottled gas. There was a fireplace with a large stone hearth. I am still not clear how it became my job to leave the cozy quilt that grandmother made for me to pad barefooted on chilly mountain mornings to the parlor to build a warming fire.

The house was one of six in a narrow valley traversed by a small clear stream. A great forest of old Koa trees with green half-moon leaves climbed the hills on either side. But the most amazing thing, something that always astounded me, were the great swaths of nasturtiums that nature spread in multicolored mats beside the valley stream and up into the forest, wherever there was sun.

A two-mile trail up one side of the valley led to gentle hills and a Civilian